Diagrammatic Chicken

Recipes are a funny thing. Some people live by them - they read and follow every instruction to the letter, obsessing over how many salt grains are in a “pinch” (is that the same as a “Pinch”?) or if a splash is more than one shake of the soy sauce bottle. Then there are people like my great-grandmother, who are probably aware that “teaspoon” has a specific definition, but wouldn’t admit it if asked.

I’m somewhere in between: I like recipes in theory, but am a bit inconsistent at actually using them once in the kitchen. It’s always nice to have some idea what you’re going to need from the store, and how long it’s likely to take, but once the cooking starts, I tend to let go of what’s written down in favor of what flavors or textures or colors strike me just then. Sometimes it works, sometimes it’s a disaster. Other people generally don’t hear about the latter, and that is not about to change.

But this is all subject to a bias, generated by how recipes have always been presented to me: a list of ingredients and instructions, neatly indented and punctuated, with notes in the margins and certain words circled or crossed out and written over. Upon seeing the image above on BoingBoing last week, I couldn’t resist.

First of all, it’s beautiful. Second of all (assuming there’s not much missing from the translations), it does just what I want a recipe to do: it gives me an idea, easily subjected to my own moods and whims. In deference to that concept, I’ll only give the highlights of my version.

I used all the ingredients in the diagram (except duck, I only had chicken), plus some tapioca starch. For the “1 cup sauce” I used about 3/4 cup soy sauce, and the rest was mostly Sriracha and some lime juice.

I fried the spices in sesame oil till they were fragrant, then added the chicken and, after a couple of minutes, my shitakes. After a while I added the sauce and beer (I used Kirin Ichiban, because it’s what I had), and when the chicken was cooked I thickened it with the starch.

I served it over white hominy, because I was too lazy to make rice, and that actually worked really well. It was a bit salty (maybe less soy sauce and more beer next time), but really delicious.

Any brilliant artists out there who want to make me very happy are encouraged to paint some recipes after this fashion - my kitchen has plenty of empty wall space!